Uh Clem's Admin World

It was 1993 and I was working in the IT department of a Fortune 500 government contractor in the Washington D.C. area.  Our division of 3000 employees was using DOS based PC’s tying into Novell 3.x and cc:Mail.  I can remember the autoexec.bat file we used on all machines was over 20 pages long!  I still have a copy of it.

We were sitting in a staff meeting one day when our division’s IT director told us about a new initiative from corporate of rolling out a new application called Lotus Notes.  It was mainly to support this new corporate app, but it also did email.  He asked for a volunteer from our team to be the lead on the project.   I just happened to be the one to raise his hand.

Over the next couple of years I  set up twenty-some severs running Lotus Notes 3 on OS/2, and converting everyone’s cc:mail over to Notes mail.   I pretty much ran the division’s Notes infrastructure single handedly.  In 1996 the entire company upgraded all 200 servers to V4 in one night.  I left soon thereeafter.

Since then I have have dabbled in other non-Notes IT stuff, like that crazy IT mangagement stuff, but Notes seems to draw me back.   It gets into your blood (bleed yellow),  which is why I titled this “How Lotus Notes Got Into Me” instead of “How I Got Into Lotus Notes.”

It’s amazing how such a simple act of raising your hand can alter your entire career!